Our Readers' Dinner

Posted by: John A. Byrne on March 17

Over the more than 35 years that I’ve worked as a professional journalist, I’ve been lucky to travel the world and report on some of the most compelling issues and people. I’ve interviewed Paul McCartney and Jack Welch. Had Steve Jobs personally hand me an iPhone before it was launched and wrote cover stories and books that won attention and awards. Yet one of the most extraordinary experiences of my career occurred last week in our New York headquarters building when I met ten of BusinessWeek’s most devoted readers. Some traveled on their own dimes from Chicago, Cape Cod, Columbus, Ohio, and upstate New York to attend our March 10th event.

This was both a thank you dinner and a chance to learn in person from readers. So we invited some of our most engaged community members to give us their feedback in person in a dining room on the 50th floor of the McGraw-Hill Building here in New York. And not on a story or hot topic, but to tell us how we’re doing and what we can do better to more deeply engage our readers.

This cross-section of our community included active commenters on our stories and blogs, folks who’ve squared off in our Debate Room, and others who have expanded on their comments by taking time to write an insightful column giving their take on a topic. Many of them, we were pleased to learn, have been active in our Business Exchange.

We were delighted—but not surprised—to discover that our dinner guests’ influence extends beyond BusinessWeek.com. From blogging and social media savvy to being entrepreneurs and passionate about business issues, getting to know these readers better helped explain why our online community really lights up when they enter a room.

Dinner was more than melon and prosciutto, too. We asked our guests to take their best shots at our reader engagement initiatives and found out, as we know, that we have plenty to improve on and need to be better partners with our readers — a journey we look forward to taking with them, and you!

The group we were lucky enough to dine with:

BL Ochman, New York. Her WhatsNextBlog cuts through the hype around Internet marketing and social media. She recently launched her own community site for pet-lovers, Pawfun.com.

Tish Grier, Massachusetts. Tish is a veteran blogger and online community guru. She currently serves as chief community officer at Placeblogger.com.

Greg Fish, Ohio. Greg, who penned our first MyTake column, maintains a smart blog on science, technology and nature.

Marianne Paskowski, who now lives in Cape Cod, is a veteran journalist who writes a blog for TVWeek.com.

Chuck Gaffney, who’s based in Long Island, New York, is an entrepreneur and frequent commenter who recently penned a MyTake column for us. He beat me to the punch by already blogging about our dinner and kindly shared some of his photos with us. (Thanks, Chuck!)

Holly Garfield, who lives outside New York City, is a pseudonym used by one of BW.com’s most active commenters. We were curious to get his perspective, and he (along with our other guests) gave us a lot of smart ideas about how to improve our commenting and foster community.

Brian Lenhart, who works on Wall Street and lives in New Jersey, recently enrolled in Columbia University’s Executive MBA program. An avid member of our b-schools’ community, Brian took this blog one step further by setting up his own site, BusinessWeekCoverStory.com, to pitch us story ideas!

Antoinette Rodriguez, New York, runs MarFi Advisors and is a Wall Street-based entrepreneur. She sparked a great conversation about how this recession is forcing everyone to reinvent themselves. Antoinette also founded a program to bring digital skills to underprivileged children.

Esther Novak, who’s based in New Jersey, runs VanguardComm, multicultural marketing company. Originally from Peru, she serves on the New Jersey Governor’s Council for Economic Growth and had some very smart ideas on diversity and outreach.

Janet Ginsburg, from Chicago, knows BusinessWeek very well as a former contributor to our magazine. She’s still an ardent commenter and member of our online community. She also gave us some good feedback on Business Exchange, as she recently launched a science-based news aggregator called TrackerNews.net.

As I mentioned in my thank you note to them following our evening together, it was truly an honor for me and my team to get to know all of them better. They impressed us with thoughtful ideas and feedback on what we’ve been doing here and represent some of the best and brightest in our community of smart, curious and passionate business professionals.

We’re meeting this week to talk about next steps, and how we can better collaborate with our readers going forward. So the lively conversation that started over dinner will be continued. Thanks to everyone who joined us, and to our community editor Shirley Brady (with help from our reader engagement intern Greg Spielberg) for organizing this memorable evening. Paul McCartney and Jack Welch have nothing on this group.